Hitchens - inspirational and infuriating

Christopher Hitchens managed to be both inspirational and infuriating company. Inspirational because of his wit and his ability in discussions to adopt a counter-intuitive position and argue it with vigour even when it became obvious he believed the opposite.

He was infuriating because he always dominated conversations and effortlessly attracted female attention despite appearing not to seek it.

I recall evenings in the Groucho club in which he held court, out-talking, out-drinking and out-smoking everyone around.

I blush to remember my attempts to defend Mao and Stalin as he extolled the virtues of Trotsky. He was right about them of course, as right as he was wrong much later in his life about George W Bush.

I never spoke to him after his extraordinary conversion to the cause of latter-day US imperialism. I didn't snub him. We just didn't run into each other.

When I heard initially about his post-9/11 support for the invasion of Iraq I thought he must be playing devil's advocate, one of his favourite conversational conceits.

Realising that he had indeed bought the Bush-Blair line, I was deeply saddened (in company with many of his former political allies).

It was both in character - taking an unpopular position and pursuing it to its logical conclusion - and also out of character, because he sided so enthusiastically with a reactionary elite.

The depth of his change of mind was evident years later when he underwent waterboarding and wrote in Vanity Fair that although it did amount to torture it was not "real torture".

He concluded: "When contrasted to actual torture, waterboarding is more like foreplay. No thumbscrew, no pincers, no electrodes, no rack...

"On this analysis, any call to indict the United States for torture is therefore a lame and diseased attempt to arrive at a moral equivalence between those who defend civilization and those who exploit its freedoms to hollow it out, and ultimately to bring it down."

I was saddened by that, but there was always something to appreciate about Hitchens too, not least his passionate polemic against organised religion in his book God is not great: How religion poisons everything.

Religion, he wrote is "violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive towards children."

Thinking back to the 1970s, I can hear him saying that, with many adjectives and expletives thrown in for good measure. And that's how I wish to remember him.